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In a special school board meeting on May 31st, Lafayette Parish will consider two charter school applications, Athlos Academy, an Idaho-based education management company and Jefferson Chamber Foundation Academy, a Jefferson Parish Chamber-affiliated

In a special school board meeting Tuesday, Lafayette Parish will consider two charter school applications, Athlos Academy, an Idaho-based education management company and Jefferson Chamber Foundation Academy, a Jefferson Parish Chamber-affiliated startup looking to expand into the Lafayette market. Both of these applications, if approved, will diminish the role of local civic participation and threaten the financial and program integrity of public education delivery in Lafayette.

Public education in Louisiana is a system divided against itself. This division festers in Lafayette Parish. State Sen. Patric Page Cortez has been unable to pass legislation to address the financial inequities of charter funding while State. Rep. Nancy Landry, chair of the House Education Committee, has engineered the failure of a handful of bills to address some of these same inequities. State Rep. Stuart Bishop, sitting alongside a charter lobbyist, argued a few weeks ago for legislation that would have eliminated school zones and forced the deconstruction of Lafayette Parish’s successful, democratically-managed system of choice.

Kathleen Espinoza(Photo11: Courtesy)

Legislative folly is hard to watch. When this folly works to undermine what is essential to public education — a community’s commitment to all its children — we need to ask ourselves some questions. Are we ready as a community to abdicate our responsibility to children who are not our own? Are we ready to close existing schools to fund a charter system that always places the needs of the individual school over the needs of community?

Driven by the simplistic ideology of choice, powerful business and industry lobbyists in Baton Rouge fail to appreciate the arduous but important journey necessary for communities like Lafayette, and the neighbors they elect, to ensure that resources are distributed fairly and education programming is meeting the needs of all children. Instead, the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools’ lobby would rather that we pit child against child, parent against parent and school professional against school professional. Their advocacy ignores decades of progress in American public schools that has opened doors to every child, no matter the challenges a child faces. Meanwhile, they fail to turn a critical eye to the system for which they advocate: charter schools present obstacles that close doors on children who are poor, who have special needs and who don’t have effective advocates.

Until charter schools and traditional public schools are funded equitably and charter schools are subject to the same fiscal and program oversight as traditional schools, the Lafayette Parish School Board should reject any type 1 charter application